Meriden Agency Decides Against Helping Board

MERIDEN — A city group, frustrated with attitudes on the board of education, says it is through trying to help the board find a way to provide poor, sick children with easier access to health care.

Lou Gonzales, executive director of the health clinic and a member of the Children's Health Planning Committee, said his board of directors agreed last week not to offer services to the school board in the near future.

``The bottom line is unless the composition of the board is to change, it's really stacked against a program to help the children and Meri-care's providing of services to them,'' he said.

The comments come two weeks after the school board rejected a proposal by the committee to establish a pilot transportation program that would take sick children and their parents to Meri-Care health clinic free of charge. Committee members, who had been working on a plan since January, had not commented since the board's rejection on Sept. 7.

The board spurned the proposal made by Gonzales and another committee member, John Turley, saying among other things, they failed to demonstrate a need for such services for the students, and that it limited the children's provider options to Meri-care.

``That was just a proposal they came up with to benefit Meri-Care,'' school board President Frank Kogut said. ``They are using this to get a van, a driver and equipment they can use, and they had no data to support the need for the service -- nothing on how many kids need it or are out of school due to illness.''

Darlene Zimmerman, a consultant to the committee, said Kogut's argument was preposterous.

``That's so ridiculous that it's insulting to one's intelligence,'' she said. ``What can I say? They are not interested in the health of children.''

Zimmerman said she personally went to local emergency rooms to assess who was using it for primary care, and found it was children of working class and poor parents who had either no or little insurance.

``Obviously there is another agenda there,'' she said. ``We bent over backwards to impress upon them that the school board would not in any way have to pay for anything. So it's all very troubling and quite a mystery.''

School board member Gerard Adelman said Gonzales' reluctance to transport children to other health-care providers sank the proposal.

``We had mentioned to him from the very beginning that we did not want to set something up that was simply going to be a conduit to his institution,'' he said. ``The Children's Health Planning Committee just really blew it when they said they wouldn't take the children to whatever program the family used.''

Gonzales said he was not opposed to that, but needed time to study the feasibility of such a transportation program. But he said he believes the real issue is that the school board is hostile to the concept of providing outside health services to the children.

``It's just crazy,'' he said. ``There is a real need for services for these kids. A lot of kids end up staying in the school nurse's office and at the end of the day they go home and wind up in the emergency room by early evening.''